Why not CI/CD to other than leftmost environments?

[skttl]

I've been playing around with the new CI/CD api, and I think it works well and documentation is 👌.

But there is one thing nagging me, and might cause me to not use it. I'm missing the ability to deploy to other environments than the leftmost, or a flexible environment.

In a lot of our projects, we treat the dev environment as a playground, and most of the times, we do "hotfixes" directly to the live environment.

Having to go to dev first mean that we either need to remove our experiments temporarily, or even if there is no experiments, we basically have to deploy twice to get a simple fix out.

Is there no way we can have it deploy to other than the left most environment?

[jesp209i]

Hi @skttl
Thanks for reaching out 😄
The ability to use the CI/CD feature to deploy to any environment has been a request since day one. We have been a little reluctant to open up for this, because it goes against the established "left-to-right" deployment model recommended for Umbraco Cloud.

Our main concern is that diverging upstream environments will result in complex collision errors and/or complex git merge conflicts on the individual environments, creating pain points for user and extra work on Umbraco Support.

But we do acknowledge the growing need to customize deployment setups, so we are evaluating the consequences of opening up for this possibility.
Unfortunately for now it is now possible.

[skttl]

Thanks for getting back. We need it to be able to do hotfixes on the live environment, while there is still unfinished work on dev/staging.

It would also be nice, if there was a way through the API to initiate a deployment to the next environment, eg. dev to staging, staging to live etc. Right now you have to go through the portal (or git) for this.